[RESOLVED] Reducing server load

2005

When I have 500-600 users online my server's load is very high and I noticed that MySQL eats a lot of resources. So, I am trying to reduce the number of queries per page.

I have the following idea. When user is logged in, on each click php script connects to the database to check if this user has new instant messages. My idea is to store time in a cookie (let's say, 5 minutes) and then the script on each click will check just cookie and will connect to the db only 1 time in 5 minutes.

What do you think about it?

leatherback

I do notknow your website/database setup but.. I think that that will solve your serverload.. Unless of course there is no querying going on to create menus, content, figures, tables, images, etcetc.

MarkR

I recommend that you should do some experiments on your development network to try to determine the cause of the problem and benchmark possible solutions.

Otherwise, you're fumbling in the dark, possibly adding heaps of complexity needlessly.

Have a look at something like "Selenium" or some Apache Java web load testing thing (I've forgotten its name). Run these on your simulated clients.

Then take the a slow(ish) box to be your simulated server (make sure it has fast ethernet though and your simulated clients are as fast as possible).

Hopefully you can replicate the performance problem on your dev network. You can then try out fixes to get real data on how much effect they have.

I would normally suggest immediately upgrading the server to as much memory as the motherboard supports (as it's REALLY cheap), and then finding if you still have a problem.

Mark

2005

Thank you for your replies. It's not that my server is overloaded. At peak times the load is about 2-3. I just want to keep it like this. That's why i am removing from my scripts all unnecessary database queries.

MarkR

That's great - you should still test it in a simulated network environment. Don't try to optimise things because you think they might be good targets for optimisation.

Don't guess - measure.

You could also use APD's profiling - I've used this before - it's tricky to set up but will tell you how much time is spent in various functions etc.

Again it's meaningless though without real data.

Get real data, then optimise, the measure how effective your efforts are - if they're not significant, revert that optimisation (unless it's useful for some other reason).

Mark

2005

Thank you.